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Sunday, 9 February 2014

Cambridge raspberry jam

My day started very early I had over two hours of driving ahead of me and an extra hour added to geocache on the way and split up the journey, I was travelling to camjam.

I had done a 900 waypoint csv file for the cacheberry pi which surprisingly ran really fast and use that on the way to cambridge. I arriving I was greeted by Michael, Wesley and a few others before helping to set up by fetching tables.

I brought along the iss above.com pi and cacheberry pi and ended up squatting on the corner or Alex's table, running both pi s off a usb battery with one pi using wifi and the other gps, they were both still running 7 hours later.

I got to meet phenoptix who had a huge led tile set on display which read must have to me and next door was piborg with their monster pi truck which Clare had to squeeze into her poor old micra, I did offer to take it off their hands as my boot was bigger but was declined.

The big pi truck had 6 motors 3hp and an estimated speed of 30mph, it weighs around the same weight as an adult and uses piborg s latest motor controller boards which you can pre order from them.

As I worked around various stalls selling or running things including ryantech s robot board and Alex's raspi.tv hdmi tv which is kick starter funded I was amazed at how professional the prototype looked. Only metres away was some teenagers who had designed a portable pi using green perspect and while you could see it wasn't manufactured it had the look of look made with my own caring hands.

Hamish brought along his ups kick starter project that powers the pi with Wesley next door with his iot (Internet of things) project a twimote tweeting wii remote and thermal printer (which I neeeeed).

Another great project was the pi boat which some students had built and gave me ideas for my project I was looking at which was to build a waterproof bottle which I would chuck in the Thames and track.

There was also a scratch controlled robot and also 13 year old zac and friend with his line following robot, firstly you would never guess how young they were and secondly was how Well built it was along with all the information they had put up on the walls.

I got also to meet Carrie-Anne who had released a book for the pi and who signed my copy for me, she was just full of energy and I guessed if you sat her in front of a computer yesterday and told her you wanted the hadron atom project over in Europe reprogrammed in scratch she would have had it done.

I also met Tom Hartley the man behind airpi and excellent weather station project and also excellent talk, he showed his passion and later on twitter tweeted his ideas for airpi mark two.

Later i was seated in front of seven segment another educational device teaching children (and adults) to program. Now I admit I cannot write a python program from scratch, but stick me in front of an already running program and I can see how it runs and what does what and one of the things with seven segment was that to edit the script. But it wasn't the enthusiasm that struck me here, no something bigger and only raswik had achieved todate, it was the fact seven segment was very well documented with an easy to follow guide, something many projects have failed to do yet the few which have like these two will be the eventual winners.

The infamous recantha picorder was on display about the size of an old portable tape deck so slightly bigger than I expected but showed the labour of love put into it.

Charlotte had brought along her neopixel earrings which were bright, glad to had seen them, certainly makes me want to retry making my neopixels work.

There lastly was geeky Tim s badge which he hasn't blogged yet but is certainly a worthy project to attempt, whilst all week I was thinking of doing it with a oled and pi, I didn't fancy carrying it around all day, geekytim however useda small Gemma/arduino type board to achieve the same but better size and battery life.

So that was my day so many faces, people I already know from Milton Keynes raspi meet, twitter friends that I now have put names to faces and many more that I never knew before the event either face to face or online.

Thanks to Michael and Tim for putting together yet another successful event.